Saw All About My Mother, Was Very Disturbed.

So I was very disturbed by Almodovar’s All About My Mother.

I had missed it in original release, though I remember people talking about it, including one Spanish lit specialist who was saying that although a lot of people didn’t care for it, she found it touching, as a “love letter to his mother and all the strong women in his life”.

Later, after seeing a lot of his other stuff – I had never seen an Almodovar movie at that time – I remembered her description, and thought I would really like the film; so many of his movies are just dark and turgid, with these unexpected rays of light, and so I thought that that movie would be brighter and have a lot of very emotionally immediate moments throughout.

Instead, I found it disturbing with very few moments of light (though perhaps my perceptions were skewed because the film broke off and the projectionist left out a reel with crucial character developments, and they only played that reel after the film ended, to show us what we had missed).

Overall, the film seemed to parallel mothers, transsexuals, and actresses, where all the best ones are unknowable in some ways and engage in willed acts of self-creation, where the product is a performance that someone grows into and has just enough of a core of authenticity to convince and capture.

It was a very unsettling perspective on mothers, who we think are all sweetness and light and transparent.

On top of that, it suggested, too, that motherhood can be a fix like cigarettes or promiscuous sex, and only after trying it does a woman become almost like an addict and realize she’s come home.

I found that idea a bit sexist since it makes it seem like women are only fully realized in motherhood (much like Pope Francis’s theology of women!), but since the director parallels trannies’ commitment to being women, it seems he’s going at something larger and chosen, with motherhood being the prime example:

Just like in the key transsexual speech where people become more and more like the dream that they know they are, it seems that people who are/choose to be mothers also learn to increasingly live into the role, though they never quite arrive.

In this sense, the final dedication is key, since it's to all actresses who play actresses, all women who act, all men who want to become women, and all women who want to become mothers; Almodovar isn't dedicating to people pre-pregnancy who want to have kids, but rather women who already have kids and want to be and are trying to be mothers.

After the film, I walked down the main shopping street in the city to enjoy the day after the long winter, and it was odd to see women everywhere, and think of them as unfathomable people and potential mothers.  It was almost like they were another species.

Also, I thought that the film was very gay, since its perspective couldn’t nec. be offered by a straight man, since sexual desire would get in the way of contemplation of women and obscure the perspective. 

In that way, 2 straight men in the film were telling: the nun’s father with Alzheimer’s, who walks around and asks women how tall and what weight they are (since they’re otherwise interchangeable for him?), and the actor who bothers the tranny for a blowjob and wants her to go through with it even after she receives a phone call with bad news. 

Those moments are small but an important counterpoint to the main subject.

I want a few of my friends who had wild lives and have recently become mothers to see the film, but I’m kind of afraid to ask them to watch it, since they might read something more into my request than my getting their perspectives as young mothers.